Several times since September I’ve mentioned the new publishing platform we’ve built at TPM. In tech-speak that’s a ‘CMS’, a content management system, though the way we’ve approached it is dramatically different from a traditional CMS. Lighter, more modular, more adaptable to changing editorial needs. It’s the culmination of about four years of planning, strategizing and finally coding what a system that is purpose built for a modern digital news operation, with all the emphasis on speed, adaptability and share-ability that implies.
Yet another reason the Christie thing ain’t happening. With the glow of reelection, endless media love and before the intra-party savaging has even begun, he tops all 2016 Republicans in the Northeast but in no other region in the country.
What the hell is wrong with Richard Cohen? In the course of sorta explaining the GOP’s problem with race, Cohen notes that “people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.”
I think that was true maybe 50 years ago, in the sense that “conventional views” were considerably more retrograde, though ‘gag reflex’ is still pretty extreme. But these days we call those people ‘racists’.
Okay, so while it looked like a troop of militia types showed up to menace a group of gun control supporting moms, a new photo provided by the militia types themselves shows a friendly enough group of crazy people with paramilitary weaponry in a strip mall parking lot for some reason. Which is pretty much normal behavior.
Americans love to believe in the idea of the athlete recognized for his skills and rising out of poverty to be a superstar. (Let’s face it, most of the time when we talk about this dream, it’s male athletes that get to live it. Female athletes tend to see athletics as a path to higher education rather than wealth.) Unfortunately, that that American dream is mostly a lie.
Sitting where I sit, “Obamacare” is a focus for me in two key ways – 1st, as the editor of TPM, in terms of our news coverage and my own opinion pieces and then 2nd, as the publisher and owner of TPM, as the purchaser of health insurance for more than twenty people in two jurisdictions. There are lots of people purchasing and paying for group health insurance plans. And there’s no shortage of people in the media analyzing, reporting and pontificating about Obamacare. But I think I’m part of a pretty small population of people doing both. So, since we’ve had a number of questions about it, I wanted to give a few details about what our own experience has been with Obamacare as a small business.
Sarah Palin says she’s disturbed that many of Pope Francis’ pastoral pronouncements have “sounded kind of liberal.”
Meet Joe Olivo. He’s part of a conservative business group that sued to try to stop Obamacare. Yet lots of news outlets keep portraying him as a regular ol’ business owner, including in stories about Obamacare, without mentioning the group.
When I first saw the latest Richard Cohen brouhaha sparked by this column, I thought he suffered from Chronic Racial Grandpa-ism (CRG), a late in life on-set condition with which many of us are probably familiar. The person in question probably has little if any real racial animus and may even believe in equality as far as it goes. But they are constantly falling into ways of talking about race – and not just talking but thinking about race – that just aren’t how people talk any more. A constant source of cringes and excuse-making for younger relatives.
At 72, Cohen is old enough to be afflicted. But I don’t think that’s really what’s going on with him. There’s something more ambivalent and pernicious.
It’s not just a hobbled website. Several things came together in October to seriously challenge and perhaps truly damage the roll out and perhaps even the future of Obamacare. The hobbled website created a backdrop of dysfunction and incompetence. The mass cancellations (which in many cases weren’t cancelations at all) provided a class of aggrieved victims. The President’s promise – which never really made sense given the nature of the program – tied it to the chief executive, with a moral, broken promise edge. Republicans have been trying to dismantle Obamacare for literally years. And they’re doing everything they can to fan the flames. But over the last few days Democrats (and not just Democrats from Red States) have been coming forward to support ‘fixes’ which would either seriously complicate the launch the Affordable Care Act or even kill it in its infancy. For Democrats and especially the President (who can kill any fix with his pen), it’s time for the big gut check, one that’s not only about 2014 but stretches back into the 1940s and has implications probably decades into the future.